Rashida Jones states the obvious about sexualization and porn, talks new documentary, Hot Girls Wanted

Funny lady/shero, Rashida Jones, is promoting a documentary she produced on amateur porn called Hot Girls Wanted and simultaneously pissing off the sex-positive delusionals by stating the obvious about the industry: “It’s performative. It’s fulfilling a male fantasy.”

Jones caught the wrath of the no-thinkers in 2013 when she wrote about the “pornification of everything” for Glamour (Bitch accused her of “moralizing” and said she was “channel[ing] her inner Sunday school teacher” in the article), defending a tweet she was ripped apart over:

This fall I was hanging out with my sisters, catching up on pop-culture stuff. We watched some music videos, looked at a few Instagram accounts, and checked out blogs. And amid the usual duck-lipped selfies and staged paparazzi photos, a theme emerged: Stripper poles, G-strings, boobs, and a lot of tongue action were all now normal accessories for mainstream pop stars. Across the board the Instamessage seemed to be: ‘You know you want to have sex with me. Here, take a look at lots of parts of my body.’

In other words, Jones noticed and pointed out that which is obvious to everyone but those invested in separating their eyes from their brain. It’s possible she’s been reading Gail Dines or it’s possible Jones is a feminist who is also not a dummy.

I don’t know when the pornification of pop stars became so extreme, but as Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” video played in the background—naked fantasy women bouncing around and licking things—I realized that the lines were not really blurry at all. They were clear. A new era had arrived.

Seeing this new era of pornification, Jones tweeted, “This week’s celeb news takeaway: She who comes closest to showing the actual inside of her vagina is most popular. #stopactinglikewhores.”

Of course, the entire SJW internet accused her of “slut-shaming,” telling her to “stop policing how women dress!” and some even called her a “misogynist” (because, as we all learned last year, feminism is the new misogyny and porn is the new liberation and shutupshutuppppp if you don’t agree).

Jones was forced to defend herself:

My hashtag was ‘stopactinglikewhores.’ Key word, acting. Like I said, I’m not criticizing anyone’s real sex life; as George Michael tells us, ‘Sex is natural, sex is fun.’ But the poles, the pasties, the gyrating: This isn’t showing female sexuality; this is showing what it looks like when women sell sex.

It always makes me sad when women say things to Twitter without having learned that you aren’t allowed to talk about actual feminism on Twitter. Only (neo)liberal mantras about “choices,” “identity,” and personal feelings of empowerment allowed, pls. One of the things Twitter is best at is bullying people into regurgitating illogical dogma and ensuring they are afraid to say anything rational ever again. I don’t agree with calling any woman a “whore,” at all, but I also understand what Jones was getting at — especially after she explained it in words that I read with my eyes.

Luckily Jones hasn’t decided to abandon her brain in order to appease the masses of Slutwalkers and mychoice! feminists.

On a panel at Sundance, she and the filmmakers note a kind of homogeny about pop culture today, that Jones says is very “objectified, sexualized, performative,” even differentiating between sexuality and sexualization.

Despite bullshit rhetoric around women! making! empowered! choices! Jones says of the young women who are performing in the porn movies Hot Girls Wanted looks at, “Everybody, when they’re 18, makes stupid mistakes — [but] the cost of this is pretty high…” (take note, Belle Knox and her enablers).”They’re not considering the real cost: the psychological cost, the emotional cost, the physical cost to your body — the trauma that it does on your body to have sex for a living is a real thing…”

These young women are not enjoying the sex they’re having on camera, she says, “it’s performative. It’s fulfilling a male fantasy.”

I am actually saddened by how incredulous I feel right now. No one says this stuff in pop culture and mainstream media. No one in mainstream/popular feminism even says this stuff. There is mass denial about the traumatic impact porn has on individual women. It isn’t permissible to say that porn is bad for women, as a whole. We all say it here, of course, and many feminist theorists have been pointing out what Jones said for decades, but what she is saying is the kind of thing that simply isn’t acceptable in popular feminism today.

#Twitterfeminism is already throwing a tantrum over Jones’ remarks and will, undoubtedly, try their hardest to bully her into reneging, but alas, being the loudest doesn’t make you right. Naturally, those whose careers depend on or have been built on the normalization of the sex industry and of the objectification of women will fight to bury these truths with all their might, but they can’t force their blinders on the rest of us.

Founder & Editor

Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has been podcasting and writing about feminism since 2010 and has published work in numerous national and international publications, including New Statesman, Vice, Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, I-D, Truthdig, and more. Meghan completed a Masters degree in the department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012 and lives in Vancouver, B.C. with her dog.